‘Something Genrous in Meer Lust’?: Rochester and Misogyny

Summary

Given Rochester's undisputed status as ‘one of the dirtiest poets in the canon’, one might think that any sustained consideration of his work would at some point involve detailed attention to the issue of misogyny. This has not, however, proved to be the case. It is not that feminist criticism has neglected his writing: in the last 20 years Fabricant, Wilcoxon, Wintle and Nussbaum have all provided illuminating commentaries. Yet considering the attention devoted to niceties of satiric form or problems of textual attribution, this aspect of his work has suffered at least comparative neglect, the issues involved apparently being regarded as simultaneously too self-evident and too problematic. The general impression given is that Rochester has been too readily indulged by his proponents and too easily dismissed by his detractors, and that both parties have tended to rest their respective cases upon the more restricted question of obscenity.

In degree of physical specificity, lines such as ‘whether the Bay fuck'd you, or I the Boy’ (The Disabled Debauchee', (1.40) look positively anodyne in comparison with Dorset's ‘strange incestuous stories / Of Harvey and her long clitoris’, or claims that Mulgrave ‘rears a little when his feeble tarse’ is presented with ‘a straight well-sphincter'd arse’. As Dustin Griffin observes, ‘his obscenity and misogyny are mild when compared to Oldham or Robert Gould or a number of anonymous Restoration satirists’. Barbara Everett finds these terms evidence of ‘betrayal of human sense and meaning to mere grunting phatic gesture’. Perhaps, but they may equally well be seen as part of the Royal Society ideal of purifying the dialect of the tribe.